2002

Nobel Prize in Physics

Raymond Davis Jr. · Masatoshi Koshiba · Riccardo Giacconi

Davis spent thirty years in a gold mine in South Dakota counting solar neutrinos and finding fewer than expected — a deficit that eventually became its own discovery. Koshiba confirmed the shortfall with a different detector; Giacconi, working separately, built the instruments that opened the X-ray sky. Three careers, two entirely new windows onto the universe.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

John B. Fenn · Koichi Tanaka · Kurt Wüthrich

To weigh a protein or map its shape had long required destroying it. Fenn and Tanaka each found ways to coax large, fragile biomolecules into the gas phase intact for mass spectrometry; Wüthrich developed nuclear magnetic resonance methods to determine their three-dimensional structures in solution. Biology gained new tools; the molecules remained whole.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Sydney Brenner · H. Robert Horvitz · John E. Sulston

Brenner chose the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans as the ideal organism to trace development cell by cell — it has exactly 959 cells, every lineage mapped. Sulston followed the fate of each one; Horvitz found the genes that instruct certain cells to die on schedule. Programmed cell death turns out to be as essential to life as growth.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Imre Kertész

Kertész survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald as a teenager and spent the next fifty years writing about it — slowly, exactly, without sentimentality. His novel Fatelessness follows a Hungarian Jewish boy through the camps with a lucid detachment that is more disturbing than outrage would have been.

Nobel Peace Prize

Jimmy Carter

The committee cited Carter's decades of work after the presidency — negotiating ceasefires, monitoring elections, building houses — and added, pointedly, that finding peaceful solutions to conflicts was "the only way to peace." The remark was widely read as a comment on events elsewhere.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Daniel Kahneman · Vernon L. Smith

Kahneman, a psychologist who had never taken an economics course, won half the prize for showing that real human decision-making departs systematically from the rational-agent model in predictable ways. Smith won the other half for demonstrating that markets can be studied with controlled laboratory experiments — two ideas that together made economics considerably more honest about what it was measuring.

Ig Nobel Prize in Physics

Arnd Leike

Leike demonstrated that the foam on a glass of beer decays according to the mathematical law of exponential decline — the same equation governing radioactive decay and bacterial die-off. Beer, it transpires, is an excellent teaching aid for mathematical physics, a fact students had long suspected.

Ig Nobel Prize in Biology

Norma E. Bubier · Charles G. M. Paxton · Phil Bowers · D. Charles Deeming

Ostriches raised on British farms, the researchers found, directed elaborate courtship displays at their human keepers rather than at each other. This is arguably a management problem as much as a biological one, though the ostriches seemed satisfied with the arrangement.

Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine

Chris McManus

McManus published a systematic investigation of scrotal asymmetry in living men and in classical sculpture, finding consistent patterns across both and prompting questions about why the ancient Greeks were so observant on this particular point. The paper is entirely serious.

Ig Nobel Prize in Economics

Enron · WorldCom · Xerox

The executives and auditors of Enron, WorldCom, and Xerox were recognised for "adapting the mathematical concept of imaginary numbers for use in the business world" — a delicate way of describing accounting scandals so large that they required the invention of new vocabulary to explain them.

Ig Nobel Prize in Peace

Keita Sato · Matsumi Suzuki · Norio Kogure

The trio invented Bow-Lingual, a device that claims to translate dog barks into emotional categories readable on a small screen. Whether dogs feel understood remains unclear; that their owners found comfort in the idea seems not to require scientific verification.

Turing Award

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Ronald L. Rivest · Adi Shamir · Leonard M. Adleman

RSA, the public-key cryptosystem Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman invented in 1977, quietly protects the better part of the internet's private communications. Every padlock icon in a browser is, at some depth, a consequence of a single paper three researchers wrote in a year.

Fields Medal

Fields Medal

Laurent Lafforgue · Vladimir Voevodsky

Lafforgue proved the global Langlands correspondence for function fields — a deep bridge between number theory and analysis. Voevodsky built homotopy theory for algebraic varieties, which he deployed to prove Milnor's conjecture, a problem that had sat unresolved for decades.

Lasker Award (Basic Medical Research)

Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

James Rothman · Randy Schekman

Cells are constantly shipping cargo — hormones, enzymes, signalling molecules — in tiny membrane-wrapped parcels. Rothman and Schekman worked out the molecular machinery that sorts, seals, and delivers those parcels to the right address, a logistics system that runs in every living cell without error, millions of times a day.

Perelman posts proof of the Poincaré conjecture

In November, Grigori Perelman posted a preprint to arXiv outlining a proof of the Poincaré conjecture — the claim that every simply connected, closed three-dimensional manifold is homeomorphic to a sphere — using Richard Hamilton's Ricci flow with surgery. He posted it without announcement, declined to explain himself further, and later declined the Fields Medal and the million-dollar Millennium Prize.

Quaoar discovered in the Kuiper Belt

Chad Trujillo and Michael Brown found 50000 Quaoar at Palomar on 4 June — a trans-Neptunian object roughly 1,100 kilometres across, the largest solar-system body discovered since Pluto itself. The outer solar system was beginning to look considerably more crowded than anyone had supposed.

New insect order Mantophasmatodea described

Researchers announced a new order of insect — the first since 1915 — in wingless predatory creatures from Africa that had previously gone entirely unnoticed by science. Named Mantophasmatodea, and nicknamed heelwalkers, they had been walking around Africa undescribed for as long as entomology had existed.

Mars Odyssey maps water ice on Mars

The 2001 Mars Odyssey spacecraft detected hydrogen signatures indicating vast shallow deposits of water ice near the Martian south pole — more water than the planet had been credited with. The finding shifted thinking about Mars's past and made future human exploration feel fractionally more plausible.

Death of Stephen Jay Gould

Stephen Jay Gould

Gould died on 20 May in New York, at 60, having spent twenty-seven years writing monthly essays for Natural History magazine — a run he was forced to interrupt only by his own cancer, from which he had been told he would not recover and from which he recovered. He co-developed punctuated equilibrium and spent a career arguing that evolution was more interesting, and less linear, than most textbooks admitted.